What a coincidence!
Featured news story in Business in Vancouver: ALR to blame for Vancouver’s unaffordable real estate: Demographia
Demographia principal Wendell Cox told Business in Vancouver that the region’s agricultural land reserve (ALR) is largely responsible for high housing prices in Metro Vancouver.
“The leadership of B.C. has placed the preservation of agricultural land at a higher priority than the standard of living of people and the minimization of poverty,” Cox said. …
“The basic reason Vancouver house prices are so unaffordable is that you do not allow a competitive market to operate on the fringe.
Announcement by the Province:
The provincial government is selling 584 acres on Burke Mountain in Coquitlam as part of its ongoing disposal of Crown assets to balance the books.
On Thursday, B.C.’s finance ministry confirmed the sale of 21 parcels in the Smiling and Partington creek neighbourhoods; in the area at the top of Coast Meridian Road that is slated for the northwest Burke visioning study; and in the urban containment boundary — that is, the area without a civic development plan.
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Squeeze play: sales of unplanned land on the north, opening of ALR land on the south. The regional plan is increasingly irrelevant in the face of Demographia logic:
Alain Bertaud, senior research scholar at the Stern School of Business at New York University, wrote in the introduction to the report. “If planners abandoned abstracts and unmeasurable objectives like smart growth, livability and sustainability to focus on what really matters — mobility and affordability — we could see a rapidly improving situation in many cities.”
Mobility exists when every member of society (young, old, fit, infirm) can get where they need to in a cost and time efficient manner.
So I’d like to hear Alain explain how building housing in outer suburbs with no shops, services, recreation or transportation options improves mobility.
Maybe he’d also like to respond to the research showing that the cities that invest most heavily in roads have, on average, much worse economic results than cities that invest in other forms of mobility.
So a researcher seeking to optimize economic performance and mobility is recommending a course of action that will minimize both. Congratulations Alain, your overbuilt city where nobody can find a decent job is really affordable. At least you managed to achieve that goal.
Extraordinary. I want to believe Tyler’s simpler ‘idiot accident’ theory, but this really starts to look conspiratorial after a while…
So who needs transit, when we’re busily enabling suburban sprawl and car culture.
Funny that the only way a “competitive market” can operate on the fringe is with huge public subsidies for roads and other infrastructure.
Cox, it turns out, is a right-wing pundit and transportation consultant whose stated mission is to fight ideas and initiatives that attempt to moderate automobile use. Read about Wendell Cox and his Motordom agenda here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Cox
Well, thanks to perverse subsidies and regulations, converting the ALR into suburbs would almost certainly lower housing prices in Vancouver.
In my perfect, economically efficient world, there would be no ALR. But, there would also be high road pricing, a higher carbon tax, and land/property taxes on neighborhoods where government services are costliest to provide.
And most critically, there would be far fewer anti-urban zoning requirements in cities. Fewer height and density restrictions that create the pressure for growth in outlying areas that would otherwise be better used for farming and other purposes.
If we got rid of our perverse subsidies and regulations, we wouldn’t need the ALR to force growth into other areas, and we could allow the market to put the land to its most efficient uses (whatever that may be).
That’s my opinion.
Regulations beget regulations.
So just pave over a fertile alluvial flood plain that produces masses of Blueberries along with other crops because of regulations?
The role of public policy should be to align the interests of the free market with the interests of society.
This is why economists love the carbon tax.
The desire to pave over the ALR, which is a socially undesirable outcome, is a failure of public police to align objectives correctly.
If we removed perverse regulations and taxes (like unnecessary density restrictions and taxes in cities), removed perverse subsidies (like “free” use of road infrastructure), and nullified externalities by implementing good pigouvian taxes and subsidies (like the carbon tax), we would have no NEED for the ALR. If we calibrated incentives well, we wouldn’t need to tell people what they can do with their land, soviet-style.
I have to agree that if they allowed density in areas that already have transit (I see some pretty large parking lots and signle faminly neighbourhoods next to 25+ year old skytrain stations in Vancouver) it would no doubt take pressure off of putting growth off into green areas.
Unless there is some serious liberalisation of developement rules in existing urban areas, or the Feds decide they don’t care for immigration either more (I don’t know which one is more unlikely) you can expect the demand to pave over green areas to continue indefinately.
Recalling debates at a conference of heterodox economics organized by the Hans Böckler Foundation in Berlin last year, Cahen-Fourot says there was a distinct generational divide over the question of growth. “Most young people had no problem saying that we should take into account that there are limits to growth, whereas older people seem to have much more of a problem acknowledging that,” he says. “But it’s changing.”
I take some inspiration from this type of thinking.
See attached article:
http://www.nationofchange.org/rethinking-economics-uk-global-student-movement-takes-shape-1390492035
“It’s more than generational, it’s survival”, a young nephew of mine – who is a planning student – told me recently.
I’m a young person and I don’t think there are limits to growth.
We just need to change our inputs.
Remember the tale of Thomas Malthus. In a largely agrarian economy he recognized land is a crucial input for generating output. He also recognized, in Great Britain, land was in limited supply. He concluded growth would have to stop once we used up all available land.
Of course, he was wrong. Land is no longer an important input for generating output. Technology changed and the inputs we use to produce things changed. We can, and will, pull off the same trick again. We don’t need to burn oil to be wealthy. New York has one of the highest per capita GDPs in America and the lowest per capita carbon footprint.
I don’t believe new you has a low carbon foot print if you count all the airplanes, boats and trucks that enter and leave the city. It is an urban myth.
New York I mean ..
I don`t understand why no one bothers with looking anything up anymore.
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2008/5/carbon%20footprint%20sarzynski/carbonfootprint_brief.pdf
2008 Brookings Institution study puts New York-New Jersey-Long Island the 4th lowest in America. And I`m sure Manhattan had the lowest of any area within that region.
There is a strong negative correlation between wealth and per capita carbon emissions.
We don`t have to stop economic growth the save the planet – just the opposite. We need to become wealthier to save the planet. If cities and countries become wealthier faster, population growth will slow, emissions will slow, and the planet will be better off.
People and their opinions…